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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Mistral Soaring in Rognac

Every winter, Thierry Platon organises a serie of contest in the south east of France near Marseille. This is a good way to fly a bit during winter. This year it has been also the opportunity to test and validate a new and very promising F3F spot in Rognac. Last Sunday, 8 pilots met there for a day of practice and a mini competition. I arrived around 9am, and found Joël Carlin, a local guy, flying already since 8:15am ! The wind was strong, about 20 m/s at the edge. Later other pilots arrived, and after testing the slope one after the other, we started the contest, doing 3 runs in a row, as the landing zone was a bit far away and I would say "sportive", despite not dangerous. The left turn was pretty challenging for everybody, but when the thermal was on the slope we could achieve really fast run. Sebastien Lanes did the best time of the day in 30.66s with his Target, followed byt his father in 31.21s on FS4. Stephane Riccobonno was also pretty good with his Target/Ceres, flying a nice 32.24. He unfortunately crashed his target after a burst throwed his Target on the edge, badly dammaging the fuselage. On my side, I flew the Needle 100 and the Needle 115 and did two low 33s. Overall a very good day, with plenty of wind, lots of flights, not too cold.